Chesco land preservationist Bill Sellers passes away

WEST CHESTER — If you were to stand at a particular spot in East Fallowfield where the Buck Run and Doe Run creeks come together near the Spackman No. 3 covered bridge, you would be able to see exactly how what H. William “Bill” Sellers preached was put into practice.

There, in the Laurels Preserve that was carved out of the enormity of the former King Ranch, clear water is protected, significant historical and cultural landmarks are preserved, and thousands of acres of environmentally important land is conserved for future generations.

That all those benefits come together in that one spot is not only a fulfillment of what Sellers advocated for with passion and persuasion, not only locally but also regionally and nationally, is due in small part to his tireless efforts on behalf of the Environmental Management Center of the Brandywine Conservancy in Chadds Ford, of which he served as director for more than two decades.

Sellers, of Pocopson, died on Nov. 9 at a hospice in West Chester after battling health problems for several years. He was 71.

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In the days following his death, colleagues and friends pointed to the integral role that Sellers played in the conservation movement across the United States, but particularly in Chester County. He played a role both public and private in urging property owners and municipalities to treat their land and water with creative respect.

His work reached its zenith in 1984, when the Brandywine Conservancy purchased 5,367 acres of the former King Ranch, the verdant, rolling, scenic property that stretched across seven municipalities in western Chester County, so that it could be preserved and not sold to land developers, who looked at it as a spot for a new amusement theme park or planned community. It was Sellers who proposed using the tool of preservation easements on a large scale to conserve the land, and convinced dozens of investors to go along with his dream.

“There is a lot out there in the landscape we all love that grew directly and indirectly out of Bill’s work and influence, “ said John Snook, a former colleague of Sellers’ at the Brandywine Conservancy and a supervisor in East Bradford, where many of the ideas the two men worked on together have been put in place.

“Much of the land along the Brandywine from Greenville, Del., to Downingtown is under conservation easement to the Brandywine Conservancy,” Snook said. “People drive by every day not realizing that a lot of work went into the conservation of the scenic landscape, and it is not an accident that much of Chester County looks so different from Delaware County. Bill had a hand in nearly all of these efforts.”

“Bill wore his passion for conservation on his sleeve,” said Molly Morrison, the president of the Natural Lands Trust, who first encountered Sellers in her position as an aide to the county commissioners and later as a fellow advocate in the land conservancy community.

“That passion fueled all his professional accomplishments,” Morrison said, pointing particularly to the King Ranch purchase. “He believed in the highest levels of professionalism for conservation work, which led him to a founding role in the land trust movement, at the state and national level.

“He always operated at the vanguard of conservation innovation,” Morrison said in an interview Friday.

Snook and others said that in addition to his work to help preserve land that was threatened with possible development, Sellers was among the first to see how water protection was necessarily intertwined with land conservation.

“He looked beyond the norms that we all seem to latch onto and tried to foresee new ways to deal with issues, particularly relative to preservation of water quality and land conservation,” Snook said. “He was one of the first to embrace the idea that wastewater is not ‘waste’ to be dispensed with, but is a resource.”

To Wesley Horner, senior advisor for water resources at the Brandywine Conservancy’s environmental center, that meant Sellers would take on powerful interests and developers looking to expand their horizons. In the 1980s, for example, Sellers fought the Downingtown Area Regional Authority’s attempt to enlarge the area of its wastewater treatment facilities south along the Brandywine, which he predicted would encourage development and deteriorate water quality.

“He fought that vehemently,” Horner said. “He asked, ‘How much can you do? How far can you go? Bill understood the critical link between land and water. And that balanced approached grew out of Bill’s brain. Sometimes, his brain got the bets of him because it was moving so rapidly. But he was a very impressive character.”

He was also heavily involved in the fight against the Churchill development of Church Farm School planned by mega-developer Willard Rouse in the 1990s, arguing that it should be preserved and its acreage used for stray irrigation fields for wastewater treatment.

Sellers was born in New Orleans, La. He graduated from Tulane University but dropped out of that school’s law program and went instead to Ohio State to study city planning. He worked in Michigan, studying ways to improve inner city schools, and then went to Alaska to conduct research on the environmental impact of building an Alaskan oil pipeline.

In the 1970s, he worked on a project that eventually led to the formation of Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency, charged with implanting new clean air and water laws passed during the Nixon Administration.

In 1975, he and his wife and family moved to Pennsylvania and he took the position of director at the Brandywine Conservancy’s environmental center. He stayed there until 1998, worked briefly for the French & Pickering Land Trusts, and at the time of this death was head of an environmental planning consultancy firm, H. William Sellers & Associates.

For 23 years, he also served as a township supervisor in Pocopson, where he had the opportunity to put into place many of the land management tools he developed and promoted.

According to a biography that Sellers wrote in the weeks before his death, “to the maximum extent, he developed systems that relied on carrots rather than regulatory sticks.” He helped institute an open space program in the township that was responsible for the acquisition of land for three parks. And a house that as part of the historic Underground Railroad.

“He always looked at issues from a standpoint of solving them creatively, making the right thing to do the attractive thing to do, and looking at what others would call “problems” as challenges to tackle,” said Snook. “And he did it with gusto.”

Among those who called Sellers a friend was A. Joseph Armstrong, a leader in the Valley Forge Chapter of Trout Unlimited and the author of “Guide to Pennsylvania Limestone Streams,” a fisherman’s resource. Contacted Friday, he spoke glowingly about Seller’s legacy.

“Frankly, he was a giant,” Armstrong said from his West Bradford home. “The good he did in this community has never been fully appreciated. The county does not look the way it could have because of the things he has done.”

He is survived by his wife, Deborah, a son, Ethan, and a daughter Alyssa. A memorial service has been scheduled for December.